Bill Moyers interviews Sister Simone Campbell and Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute on the Nuns' recent bus trip and the social agenda of the Catholic Church.
On a personal note, I was involved in an exchange with some Catholic colleagues recently on the whole issue of the idea of the "seamless garment" approach to Catholic social teaching that was promoted by the great former Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. While on the one hand I think that there is a lot to admire in the kind of effort at moral consistency that the seamless garment doctrine requires, I think on the other that such an effort at moral consistency actually can lead to a number of morally untenable conclusions (such as opposition to contraception, for example).
Nevertheless, the advantage of being a non-Catholic Christian who is in dialogue with and admires much of the Catholic moral teaching is precisely that I'm not bound to hold that all aspects of Catholic social teaching are part of a self-consistent whole, or that by endorsing Catholic thinking on one issue I'm therefore required to swallow it whole. It is possible for me to admire Cardinal Bernardin and Dorothy Day without having to agree with them on everything; indeed I find it absurd to think that I'd have to accept everything they believed in order to admire anything they believed.
Truth be told, most of the best Catholic moral thinkers I'm familiar with don't hold that either, and all the better for the future of Catholic moral thought, and for its ecumenical dialogue partners.
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